


Shoveling Snow

by Misfit_McCoward



Series: UlquiHime Domesticity AU [2]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Ulquiorra is still a terrifying undead monster...... he just lives with Orihime now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:33:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27827578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Misfit_McCoward/pseuds/Misfit_McCoward
Summary: Ulquiorra very calmly turns the corner to find that in his three minute absence, Orihime has somehow managed to die.“Okay, okay,” her soul is muttering to herself as she paces in front of her fallen body, arms windmilling around her. “Don’t panic! You can fix this!”OR: Ulquiorra helps Orihime with a basic winter chore. Despite the dying, it's very fluffy.
Relationships: Ulquiorra Cifer/Inoue Orihime
Series: UlquiHime Domesticity AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2036584
Comments: 12
Kudos: 89





	Shoveling Snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fascinationex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/gifts).



> This is a prompt fill for fascinationex: "Shovelling snow, but it's Ulquiorra and Orihime."
> 
> This takes place in a universe where Ulquiorra is still alive and still an arrancar, but he's living in Orihime's apartment as her weird scary roommate none of her regular human neighbors can see.

December brings snow, and the snow coaxes the woman into yet another of her absurd rituals. 

“We can go down to the park and make snow robots!” Orihime chirps, pulling on yet another layer of clothing. “They’re like snowmen, but gender neutral. And then we can make snow angels, and– oh!– have a  _ snowball fight–” _

Ulquiorra tilts his head ever so slightly. Snow-based warfare? Perhaps she will finally use her superior fighting skills to exert dominance over the other human garbage in this town. But, no, she switches to babbling about hoping there’s enough snow to make a “snow cave,” and then segues into a detailed description of a fantasy about drinking hot cocoa with a penguin. Ulquiorra doesn’t even know what a penguin is. 

Orihime’s body is soft and weak to the elements, so she requires various pieces of thick armor to withstand the cold of the outdoors. She pulls on thick socks and sweatshirt, followed by boots and a puffy yellow coat. She covers her hands in pink gloves, and then snaps a pair of fluffy white earmuffs around her head. 

“But first,” Orihime says, her eyebrows coming down in grim determination. She holds a shovel up like a weapon. “We dig out Mrs. Tanaka’s car.”

Mrs. Tanaka is Orihime’s neighbor. Orihime is always doing favors for her, for reasons that Ulquiorra doesn’t quite understand. Orihime’s reiatsu is much stronger, and her body better equipped for fighting. Mrs. Tanaka should be the one doing favors for Orihime. 

When he’d pressed the issue before, Orihime had given him all sorts of reasons for helping her neighbor. She seems to think it’s some sort of moral imperative, which makes no sense. The only reason she ever gives for helping neighbors that makes sense to Ulquiorra is that his presence in her apartment gives them all vivid nightmares and chronic anxiety, making them too impaired and weak to properly care for themselves. Orihime making ginger, mascarpone, and red bean buns for Mrs. Tanaka whenever she hears her sobbing late at night is simply Orihime demonstrating her superior physical fortitude. 

Ulquiorra follows Orihime outside. The landing of her apartment building is covered, but there’s still a dusting of snow, blown onto the concrete floor. Icicles hang from the guard rails. 

“Wow!” Orihime exclaims, pausing to lean over the rails and observe the street below. 

Ulquiorra has never seen snow in person, but Orihime has been binge watching winter-themed romance movies. He knows what snow is supposed to look like: vast and white and colorless, a sick imitation of the sands of Hueco Mundo. The street below does not look like this at all. It’s been treated with some sort of chemical that makes the snow sloshy and gray, and something has pushed large quantities of snow from the street onto the surrounding pavement, blocking in the cars park on the sides of the road. 

Perhaps helping with the car makes sense, Ulquiorra thinks as he follows Orihime down the metal stairs of her apartment building. Mrs. Tanaka occasionally drives Orihime to get groceries, which allows her to purchase more food at once. 

In Hueco Mundo, the ability to acquire more resources was always an advantage, even if you were a weak hollow. 

Orihime usually bounds down the stairs with unnecessary enthusiasm, simply for the joy of hearing her feet bang against the metal. Today she goes slowly, squinting at the steps one by one as she descends. 

Ulquiorra makes a noise in the back of his throat. It is not annoyance, or even true curiosity, but rather a prompt for Orihime to explain. He’s been making the noise a lot since he moved in. Orihime never fails to answer. 

“Sometimes the steps get icy,” Orihime says. “And then someone could slip and really hurt themselves! We should clear off any ice if we find it.”

She wastes a long time hitting a few steps with the back of the shovel to crack the ice, and then trying to scrap it off. Her brows are furrowed in concentration as she does it, her tongue poking out the side of her mouth. Ulquiorra watches passively for a while, because the absurd amount of effort Orihime will put into tasks that bring no benefit to herself is fascinating. He thinks it must have something to do with the human concept of the ‘heart,’ and he’s convinced that if he watches her enough, he’ll understand. 

But then she wastes a full twenty minutes on one particularly icy step, and he gets bored. Hands still in his pockets, he steps forward and puts one foot on the step. A little bit of reiatsu channeled downward is enough to melt the ice. Whatever frail little humans that live in the adjacent apartment definitely just experienced a sudden wave of all-encompassing fear that will haunt them for days, but whatever. 

Orihime’s grey eyes light up with joy he doesn’t quite understand. She was wasting his time, and he corrected the situation. 

“Perfect!” Orihime says, then hops down the last two steps to the ground. “Hmm, but maybe I should make my special seaweed and sriracha cookies for the Ito family…?”

Her boots crunch in the snow as she talks about how it’s a pity Ulquiorra’s corrosive reiatsu makes her neighbors sad, but at least it killed all the cockroaches in the building. Orihime can always find a positive. 

The cars are all covered in snow, and it takes a while for Orihime to identify Mrs. Tanaka’s. The sidewalk is covered in salt, which is meant to help the snow melt, but there are still patches of gray ice where the snow has melted and then re-froze. Orihime nearly slips on one, and Ulquiorra’s hand shoots out automatically to steady her. 

“Wow, that was close!” Orihime says, then laughs. She pats Ulquiorra’s upper arm affectionately as he lets her go. 

“You’re clumsy,” Ulquiorra says, because she is. All that power, and she still frequently burns herself cooking. 

Orihime eventually determines which car is Mrs. Tanaka’s, having brushed off snow from a window with her hands. Mrs. Tanaka has decorated the insides of her car with good luck charms, because sometimes she has panic attacks while driving. She hasn’t yet seemed to have put together that they happen exclusively when Orihime in is the car, because sometimes Ulquiorra follows her. 

None of Orihime’s neighbors have enough reiatsu to even stomach being in his presence, and they definitely don’t have enough to see him. It must be a pathetic life, to be haunted by a presence they have no way to sense. 

Shoveling the car out takes more effort than it should, in part because Orihime is careful to move the snow so it’s not blocking the pedestrian path or any of the other cars. Ulquiorra does not offer to help, because she doesn’t ask. He is content to watch.

“Phew!” Orihime says when she’s about halfway through. She steps back, wiping her brow with the back of her arm. “My gloves have gotten all wet. Could you go grab me another pair?”

She peels off her gloves, and her hands are red with cold underneath. Ulquiorra stares at them in fascination. Shinigami are human-like in their mannerisms and complained constantly about the cold of Las Noches, but he’s never seen any of them change colors. 

Orihime passes him her gloves– soggy with melted snow– and tells him where he can find another pair. He does what she asks, because it requires very little energetic expenditure from him, and because she understands that even though she is providing him with the resource of shelter, this isn’t an act of subservience. Ulquiorra does stupid little favors for her, like fetching a towel when she’s forgotten one in the shower and keeping his reiastu in check so he doesn’t kill all her neighbors, and she answers all his questions. It’s a fair trade. 

Her spare gloves, which are lavender and have fake fur around the cuffs, are exactly where she says they are. Ulquiorra is halfway down the stairs again when he hears a shriek from her. 

He doesn’t rush, because he would sense if there were any enemies in the area. Orihime screams frequently at things she doesn’t find frightening, like small animals, or ghosts in the horrible movies she likes. 

(He doesn’t understand her screaming at the ghost movies. Ghosts aren’t nearly as scary as hollows, and no hollow she could possibly encounter in Karakura Town is as scary as Ulquiorra.)

Ulquiorra, therefore, very calmly turns the corner to find that in his three minute absence, Orihime has somehow managed to die. 

“Okay, okay,” her soul is muttering to herself as she paces in front of her fallen body, arms windmilling around her. “Don’t panic! You can fix this!”

Ulquiorra shoves her gloves into his pockets, because they seem like a moot point now. 

Orihime must have managed to slip on another patch of ice. Her body is crumpled at the front of the car, her head bleeding against the curb. Her orange hair is splayed around her, now damp with half-melted grey snow slush and blood. 

“Miss?” a man walking his dog at the end of the block calls. “Miss!”

“Your soul chain is still intact,” Ulquiorra points out, coming to stand across Orihime body’s from Orihime’s soul. Her soul chain does indeed hang unbroken between her soul's chest and her body's. Usually when humans die, it's snapped all together. 

“Yes,” Orihime says, clenching her fists in determination in front of her. “Which means I can still heal myself!”

Ulquiorra does not know the limits of human biology, nor does he know the limits of Orihime’s abilities. He doesn’t think  _ Orihime _ knows her limits. She brought back Ulquiorra; who’s to say she couldn’t raise herself from the dead?

The man with the dog rudely butts in, a mobile phone between his ear and shoulder. 

“No, I don’t think she’s breathing,” he says to the phone, squatting over Orihime’s body. “Should I move her?”

“No!” Orihime cries, waving ineffectually at the man as he gives the phone their location. “Please don’t touch my corpse!”

The man steps back, pulling his dog away from sniffing Orihime. Two women in tracksuits jog over to ask what’s going on and if they can help. 

“Well?” Ulquiorra asks as Orihime stares mournfully at the small crowd forming on the sidewalk. “Go on. Heal yourself.”

“But…” Orihime fidgets. “There are people.”

“So?” Ulquiorra asks. “Who cares what they think?”

Orihime waves at the building behind them. “I live here!” she cries. “I don’t want the neighbors to think I’m– I’m sort sort of  _ android witch slayer– _ although that would be cool…”

She taps her chin as she considers the pros and cons of being an android witch slayer. A man appears from the apartment building across the street and declares himself an EMT. 

“I can start CPR,” the man says grimly. Ulquiorra does not know what CPR is, but it makes Orihime scream again. 

“No no no!” she cries. “Stop! I can handle it myself, Mr. EMT!”

She goes to push him away from her body as the EMT and one of the jogging women lay her out on the sidewalk. Her soul ineffectually passes right through him. 

The EMT kneels next to Orihime’s body, placing his hands on her chest. More curious watchers have appeared.

“This is getting ridiculous,” Ulquiorra decides. He lets out his reiatsu, just a little bit. Not enough to kill the stupid little humans, because then Orihime will get upset, but enough to knock all of them and the little dog out. 

He’s practiced this before, on Mr. Sato who lives down the hall from Orihime and sometimes spends too long outside her window. They’ll come to in a few hours, and then be paranoid and jumpy and hallucinating for a few days. Mr. Sato always comes back to leer at Orihime after a while, so Ulquiorra assumes there will be no permanent damage. 

(Orihime never cooks for Mr. Sato, which is basically a damnation from her.)

Orihime looks deeply relieved as all the other humans collapse. 

“Thank you,” she breathes at Ulquiorra. “Can you move him?”

Ulquiorra pulls the EMT off of where he’s collapsed onto Orihime’s body and casually tosses him aside into a snowbank. Orihime takes his place in kneeling by her body's side. Her fairies appear from the everpresent clip in her hair, and this time only one of them shoots Ulquiorra a wary look. 

Then there’s the wail of sirens of the distance, and Orihime’s head jerks up in panic. Her eyes, wide with fear, turn to Ulquiorra. 

“You have to move me,” she says. 

“Why?” Ulquiorra asks. Orihime sounds very urgent, though, so he’s leaning over her body to pick her up before she explains. 

“Watch my head,” Orihime says, still urgent, and Ulquiorra changes his plan to just carry her under his arm like he would a hollow he’s planning to drag back to his lair to eat, to sliding his arms under her knees and back like the protagonist of one of her dumb romance movies. 

It makes sense. Human heads are especially fragile. 

“Hurry! Hurry!” Orihime cries, waving her arms at him. Ulquiorra uses a sonido to get them back the stairs of her building, making sure her delicate, weak head is nestled securely against his shoulder. 

Orihime’s soul shrieks comically as she dragged along by her soul chain. 

“Whoa!” she says as she follows him up the stairs, patting her hair back into place as she goes. “That felt really weird. But now the ambulance won’t cart my body away!”

Ulquiorra puts her body on her couch. Overall, Orihime seems pleased with the situation. 

It only takes her a few minutes to heal her body enough that her soul chain retracts. Orihime yelps as it suddenly yanks at her soul’s chest, pulling her back into her body. The orange light of her healing ability flickers and dies. Ulquiorra watches with fascination. He’s seen human soul chains snap before, but he’s never seen one pull a soul back in like that. 

“Nnngh,” Orihime groans, now back in her body. She moves to roll over, and Ulquiorra has to push her back onto the couch to prevent her from falling. 

“You’re not fully healed,” he tells her. “Bring your fairies back out.”

Orihime seems confused– which happens with human head injuries, he’s learned from TV– and it takes a lot of prompting to get her to heal herself again. She finally manages it, though, and is quickly speaking in coherent sentences again. 

“Clumsy woman,” Ulquiorra tells her as she sits up carefully. 

“You didn’t even take my shoes off,” Orihime complains weakly. She pulls them off, then her socks, then unzips her coat. The earmuffs are lost somewhere outside. 

Ulquiorra watches her hands as she goes. They’re still red with cold. 

“Yeah, I guess my body stopped making heat while I was dead…?” Orihime says when she notices him watching. She clenches and unclenches her hands into a fist. 

Ulquiorra, standing in front of her, reaches out and runs his fingers along hers. She doesn’t pull away, watching him curiously. 

Human extremities are supposed to be cooler than their middles, Ulquiorra knows. Orihime’s hands, though, feel as cold as his own undead ones. 

“What does it feel like?” he asks. 

“They hurt to move, a little bit,” Orihime says. “And they’re getting all tingly now that they’re warming up.”

“What stupid biology,” Ulquiorra says, and Orihime laughs. 

She lets him massage her hands for a few more minutes, watching as the red fades to pink. Then she suddenly jumps up and exclaims that she didn’t finish digging the car out. 

“It literally killed you,” Ulquiorra says, but she still looks anxious about the whole stupid situation. “Fine,” he says, “I’ll finish it.”

Outside, an ambulance is parked next to Mrs. Tanaka’s car, and people are loading the humans Ulquiorra knocked out onto stretchers. In the distance, he can hear more sirens. 

It takes him about twenty seconds to clear the car, because he just uses his reiatsu to melt the snow. It knocks out the ambulance-associated humans in the process, but Ulquiorra doesn’t particularly care. He finds Orihime’s earmuffs, now covered in blood from her fall, and picks up her abandoned shovel as well. Both items get dumped in the genkan when he goes back to the apartment. 

Orihime is singing one of her baking songs in the kitchen, and eventually she comes out and hands Ulquiorra a mug. 

“Try this,” she says. “I made hot cocoa with chilli powder! It’s how the Aztecs used to drink it.”

Ulquiorra has no need for human food, but he tries it when Orihime presents it to him. The drink is warm and sweet, with an aftertaste that burns his throat. He imagines it would be soothing to humans, who suffer inconveniences like being cold. 

Orihime wraps herself in a blanket and settles onto the couch her own mug, and he sits next to her. On the local news, there’s a story about yet another localized gas leak causing twelve people to collapse in Karakura Town. Orihime writes down the name of the hospital they’ve been sent to. 

“Do you think I should send them orange marmalade and fish filled buns, or my special wasabi dango?” Orihime asks. 

Ulquiorra thinks it over. “You’re already making cookies for the Ito family,” he says. “It’s more efficient to just double the recipe.”

“Ah, you’re right!” Orihime says, snuggling further into her blanket and then leaning her head against his shoulder. “What would I do without you?”

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT TO ADD: Apparently December 1st (the day this was posted) is actually Ulquiorra's birthday! I didn't know hollows _had_ birthdays, but regardless, happy birthday u weird sad clown monster.


End file.
